He said that his 30 years as a police officer force had been “great” and he had enjoyed his time with the force.

Insp Fairbrother, 52, whose grandfather, brother and uncle have also been police officers, said: “It is a bit of family thing.”

He grew up in Bootle, later going to university, where he obtained a degree in maths and biophysics, before working in marine engineering.

Soon after, he registered with the Home Office to join the police. His first interview was

with Merseyside Police and he was offered the job straight away.

Insp Fairbrother told the Visiter that policing the area had its pros and cons.

He said: “When I joined up Bootle was the area that I still lived and grew up in. In one way it was easy because I knew all the roads and in another way it was difficult because I was locking up all the people I went to school with.”

Over the years Insp Fairbrother has worked on a number of high profile incidents – something he said had “just fallen that way”.

One of the most notable was when James Bulger went missing from the New Strand Shopping Centre in 1993 – Insp Fairbrother was involved in the initial search for the toddler. At the time he had just been promoted to sergeant.

He said: “The New Strand at that point always had a police officer on the beat – there was never a moment there was not a police officer there. I had spent a lot of time walking around there, and – like all shopping centres – kids go missing all the time. It was sometimes three or four a day.

“The New Strand had quite a good CCTV camera system. It was quite a good process because it happened so often.

“On the day that James Bulger went missing, originally it was just a missing from home, but it did not take very long for us to realise that it wasn’t and that is when it moved on quite quickly.

“It was a unique and a very rare case – to have a young child abducted by two other children and then murdered. It was such a rare incident.”

Insp Fairbrother was also on duty for Hillsborough, describing it as “quite an emotional night for everyone”.

He said: “We got a lot of messages, we were the night section and it was falling on us to tell people to go to Sheffield and that they had found someone that matched the description they had given.

“We had hundreds of people go to a Liverpool match and they nearly all wore a Liverpool kit.

“I was a Scout leader at the time, one of the Cub Scouts had gone to Hillsborough with his father and somehow they got separated. The description we got was nine-year-old, wearing a Liverpool kit with blonde hair.

“We got this message at about 4pm in the morning that there was someone injured matching that description. I went out to his home and while I was there one of his uncles phoned up and said, ‘We are stuck in Sheffield and can’t get back but we have found your son, he is with us’.

“Heysel had not been that long beforehand. There was always that shadow of that.

“It was an emotionally draining shift – the work itself was easy, we were just going to an address and delivering a message. But at the end of the day there were all these families and tragedies at the back – all we were doing ase turning up and upsetting people. I can think of better times.”

Insp Fairbrother said that a career high point was getting international recognition, by becoming Herman Goldstein Award finalists for reducing the number of crimes against elderly people in Southport.

He added: “We had worked hard all year and done lots of work – the end result is that we reduced it, particularly in the town centre, to almost nothing – that was great.”

Since becoming neighbourhood inspector for the town, he has also been the driving force in reducing overall crime dramatically.

He said: “Over time all the incremental work we have done has had a result – we have reduced violent crime in the town centre, to the point where it is really low for a night time economy.

“A lot of the work was designed in infrastructure changes and does not rely on police officers, things like alley-gating exits, installing better lighting, CCTV cameras, taxi marshals, getting the standards in the bars up – it is really quite hard to dismantle.

“Looking at the crime rate in Southport, people have the wrong perception, the reality nowhere near matches people’s perception of Southport.

“When I first started we would have 70 or 80 violent offences in the night time economy in a month.

“They would be a lot of serious injuries where people would end up with stitches and broken bones ; if we have 15 incidents in a month like that now that is a really bad month.

“There are an increasing number of weekends every month which are violence free weekends, which we never had eight or nine years ago.

“You are never going to remove violence from a night time economy completely, you are always going to get those people who get drunk because it is in their nature.

“I do not know what the answer to stopping that is, and if I did I would probably be the Home Secretary,” he said laughing.

“What I do know is that we have chipped away at it and invested a lot of money.”

He said there had been many changes to policing over the past three decades: there used to be considerably more walking and when he joined officers still wore tunics and Henley coats.

A Southport resident and a father of one, Insp Fairbrother said he will be spending his retirement looking after his three-year-old daughter.

He added: “It is funny when people ask her what her daddy does, she says, ‘Daddy puts bad people on the naughty step’. That is her version of my job description.

“I don’t know if I am looking forward to my last day at work. Ask me afterwards.”